Occam's Razor Applied to Small, Plastic Toys
Listening to The Goldberg Variations (Bach and Schiff)
The robot is still missing and there is some debate as to whether it's disappearance is accident or conspiracy. I tend to choose the simplest solution in any case such as this and I think it got broken and was thrown away when the office was cleaned. I am not sure this is the simplest solution but rather the most plausible. I suppose that this is like using Occam's Razor to decide on whether life is the result of a single button press on behalf of the creator or a long and complex path of ever-increasing complexity leading to more and more intelligent life-forms. The button-press sounds much the more plausible solution doesn't it? Until of course you add in the question of who created the creator which in a single leap increases the complexity by orders of magnitude. One golden moment of a great idea realised as a beautiful whole or a slow and laborious climb mostly involving slime and insects with a lot of dead ends (literally) along the way.
I think this is the theme of Climbing Mount Improbable - a title which I just realise must be a quiet tribute to Douglas Adams because of course we are dealing with the improbable rather than the impossible. The return argument is of course, that at the level of a possible creator, the spiritual transcends reality and needs no scientific explanation. This is why, no matter how strong anyone's belief in science and rationality is, everyone (even Dawkins I seem to remember) has to lay some portion of their confidence aside to accommodate the possibility that rationality fails.
I'm not sure the argument in that last paragraph was in any way structured and robust. It leaves out a lot of airy thought-processes from my internal formulation of it. I am not eloquent enough to arrange those thoughts.
The robot is still missing and there is some debate as to whether it's disappearance is accident or conspiracy. I tend to choose the simplest solution in any case such as this and I think it got broken and was thrown away when the office was cleaned. I am not sure this is the simplest solution but rather the most plausible. I suppose that this is like using Occam's Razor to decide on whether life is the result of a single button press on behalf of the creator or a long and complex path of ever-increasing complexity leading to more and more intelligent life-forms. The button-press sounds much the more plausible solution doesn't it? Until of course you add in the question of who created the creator which in a single leap increases the complexity by orders of magnitude. One golden moment of a great idea realised as a beautiful whole or a slow and laborious climb mostly involving slime and insects with a lot of dead ends (literally) along the way.
I think this is the theme of Climbing Mount Improbable - a title which I just realise must be a quiet tribute to Douglas Adams because of course we are dealing with the improbable rather than the impossible. The return argument is of course, that at the level of a possible creator, the spiritual transcends reality and needs no scientific explanation. This is why, no matter how strong anyone's belief in science and rationality is, everyone (even Dawkins I seem to remember) has to lay some portion of their confidence aside to accommodate the possibility that rationality fails.
I'm not sure the argument in that last paragraph was in any way structured and robust. It leaves out a lot of airy thought-processes from my internal formulation of it. I am not eloquent enough to arrange those thoughts.
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